This disavowing and link removing is a total waste of time. How many small businesses must Google destroy before users say "enough" and stop using their search engine? How many top thought leaders' sites will not appear in search before users realize what they are losing by allowing Google's monopoly to continue?

Here are some examples that SEOs should understand. Have you not ever wondered why SEOBook and GrayWolfSEO do not come up in search results for SEO topics? Do you not care about their opinions? How many even notice they don't come up? I do not remember seeing either of those sites in Google's serps for years now.

If you do a site:theirdomain.com search you will find them. But try this. Aaron recently wrote about "disavow and link removal" so plug that into Google and look for his post. Didn't find it? You won't (unless Google reads this and changes what they're doing). Google has judged SEOBook "not worthy" and will not show his posts. In fact - for that search I'm only showing TWO pages of results. (I attached pg 2 so you can see that is all there is - and I can send anyone screen captures of both pages as I see them right now.)

Google hides sites because they can. THEY decide whose wisdom can be easily found and whose does not show up in searches unless you use the site:domain command to find them. We should be working to get some search engine alternative to be as good and then promoting the heck out of it. Is there one? If we do not stop this trend less and less truth will be found online except by those wise enough to seek it out by alternative means.

Comments

Just a thought here but it seems to me that when people try to learn how the system works for the purposes of reaping the rewards for themselves that's gaming the system and it lowers the experience for everyone. The vast majority of SEO sites and articles are trying to teach exactly that: how to game the system for personal gain.

Obviously Search Engines, and everyone else who wants a good search experience, don't want the system gamed thus the rankings of pages that teach users how to do it are lowered because that's not content that they want you finding (and, yes, unfortunetaly the good sites get buckleted with the bad ones in this instance - but if they truly are SEO wizards then that shouldn't be a problem, should it? lol).

In my eyes SEO means 1 thing: It's not about getting more traffic or optimizing your conversion rates. It's about getting the right content in front of the right user at the right time, whether that happens for the keywords that you target or not it doesn't matter.

But that being said I done a search for the article you mentioned and found SEOBook.com in the serps with my first try. Try searching [understand google disavow] and there it is in the first spot. It might just be that the site is getting found for longtail terms that you aren't thinking of and now that google are pretty much passing 100% not provided results how would the site owners even know?

EDIT: I also searched for [disavow and link removal] like you suggested, but I done it on Google.co.uk, and seobook shows up as listing 2.

Thanks for the link, Tom. Interesting results. Google neither knows nor cares about quality or authority. They care about favoring big brands, deciding what we will be able to find, spoon feeding the masses propaganda, and making sure small businesses and bloggers are not able to make a living without being pawns in some corporate game.

The time is coming for any who have sense to stop using Google. We need to find a search engine that has their own crawlers. Someone on threadwatch must know if such an engine exists.

I hate to keep harping on it, but the results you see in Google are the popular results, not the accurate results.

What does this mean? If there are trillions of pieces of information out there on the Internet, and Google magically comes up with a result to your query in a split second, did those results come from the trillions of pieces of information? Or did they come from the same generic responses you always see on the front page? Popular results are a real benefit for Google. As long as a person getting the result sees a result...and as long as that result appears to be the right result (not necessarily the accurate result)...then Google keeps everyone believing that they have an amazing Algorythm. But if there are trillions of pieces of information out there and only 1 tenth of one percent of those results are popular by Google's standards (already found by the public like ebay/amazon), then those are the only results Google needs to carry/index and so answers come instantly. You don't find that obscure blogger that really did have the best price you were after.

So in essence humanity is being dummied down by what amounts to a nifty encyclopedia britanica called Google (not really artificial intelligence). We are not always getting accurate answers but believe we are. Datacenters are prestocked with the popular websites, and that's what you get in that split second..which is very easy for Google to do. So although Greywolf may have some accurate observations on SEO, if he's not deemed "Google" popular, he isn't in the index and we are all that much more ignorant about SEO because of it.

If you understand the limitations of the program, you stop seeing Google as the all-knowing OZ with a human personailty out to get you. Instead you see it for what it is. A flawed program that will eventually be replaced by humans.